Posted by Jamie Forrest, April 22, 2008 at 11:45 AM
Last year, the New York Times reported about the battle in Normandy over how its beloved Camembert could be made. It was a classic David-meets-Goliath tale of cheesy proportions: on one side you had large dairy operations lobbying the French authorities to allow them to call their cheeses Camemberts even if they had been made with pasteurized milk; on the other side you had the small-scale traditional Norman cheesemakers, still making the cheese from raw milk, ladling every scoopful of curd by hand, trying to fight this change to the decades-old A.O.C. legislation.
Well, the Guardian reported this weekend that David was victorious: A.O.C. Camembert must still be made with raw milk.
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Posted by Ed Levine, June 20, 2007 at 8:21 AM
In this morning's New York Times Elaine Sciolino reports that certain French Camembert makers want to change the rules to allow the formerly unpasteurized raw milk used to make traditional Camembert to be treated and yet still receive the anthenticating AOC designation from the government. A couple of years ago Jeff Steingarten and I sat down at Artisanal with one of its young fromagers for a taste test to find out if one can tell the difference between treated and untreated Camembert.
Cheese gendarmes, please note that the untreated, raw milk cheese had been smuggled in by a third party unrelated to either me or Steingarten or the fellow from Artisanal.
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Posted by Ed Levine, June 20, 2007 at 7:56 AM
In this morning's New York Times, Elaine Sciolino reports that certain French Camembert makers want to change the rules to allow the formerly unpasteurized raw milk used to make traditional Camembert to be treated and yet still receive the authenticating AOC designation from the government. A couple of years ago, Jeffrey Steingarten and I sat down at Artisanal with one of its young fromagers for a taste test to find out if one could tell the difference between treated and untreated Camembert.
Cheese gendarmes, please note that the untreated, raw-milk cheese had been smuggled in by a third party unrelated to either me, Steingarten, or the fellow from Artisanal.
Continue reading »
